"Maybe He'll Listen to the CEOs Who Are About to Get This in the Throat"

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey has spent a career worrying about the twin threat of debt and valuations. On Monday, in the Financial Stability Board’s letter to the G20’s finance ministers and central bank governors, Bailey says a new horror has moved to the front of his nightmares: “For the financial system, the most immediate concern is the potential impact of frontier AI on cyber risk.” He’s worried about sovereign debt fragilities, private credit, and stretched asset valuations, sure. But what frontier AI can do, he wrote, is “materially alter the speed, scale and economics of cyber risk.”

Last night, I tried to articulate what he means. In February 2016, a crew the Justice Department later attributed to North Korea’s military spent months inside Bangladesh Bank’s systems, took its SWIFT credentials, and tried to move $951 million out of its account at the New York Fed. They got $81 million out the door. That operation took a nation-state’s patience and a nation-state’s payroll. Rapid7’s threat researchers catalogued the criminal AI-as-a-service market this June and found FraudGPT renting for a few hundred dollars a month, entry-level tools going for a few dozen, and a class of product that expands “the range of actors able to perform tasks that previously required more time, skill, or external support.” To be an effective cyber-criminal today, you don’t need to know code, cryptography, or even English.

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Meanwhile, the president spent the same day telling Americans that towns opposing AI data centers will end up “backwards and poor.” Why all this anger about data centers? I think they are the first time most people have been able to point a finger — and a camera — at AI. The building is where the thing lives — the one that threatens your job and your kids. And as I explained to Jim Sciutto, if the administration won’t hear that from the people living next to one, the numbers arriving from the business leader Trump prefers to listen to aren’t friendlier — the FBI’s IC3 logged $20.9 billion in reported U.S. cybercrime losses in 2025, and the IMF’s 2024 estimate puts a single financial firm’s worst year at about $152 million in a median year and $2.2 billion once a decade.

Even Bill Gates, who spent the antitrust era railing against regulation, published nearly 6,000 words last week arguing that AI needs an international body in the spirit (and with the authority) of nuclear weapons inspections, aviation rules, and the ozone treaties. When Trump isn’t motivated by attention, he’s motivated by money, and has made a career out of borrowing vast sums of it. Bailey is telling the people who loan it what’s coming for them. Perhaps a banker can get through to the president.